Alarm systems are crucial devices of monitoring systems or control systems of technical installations, for example power plant installations or production installations, and are an important aid for the operating personnel in order to detect installation or process states which specify immediate intervention. The method of operation of the alarm systems for determining and displaying installation or process states is determined by alarm messages, that is to say by defined limit values of process variables, for example. The operators of the installations are provided with these alarm messages in a wide variety of ways.
A so-called alarm panel is used to assign a defined region inside a graphical presentation to each alarm message. If a limit value assigned to this alarm message is exceeded or undershot, the color of the region changes or the region begins to flash, for example.
A further type of presentation from known systems is the use of a list to list the pending alarm messages, the respectively new alarms being continuously added at the start or end of the list. In this case, those alarms which have not yet been acknowledged by the operator are marked in color or are signaled using a flashing signal. In order to indicate alarm messages in terms of their priority, different font colors are used for the respective priority of the alarm message and acoustic signals are used for high-priority alarm messages, but said signals produce non-negligible noise in the long run.
The practice of notifying the operators of the installation using SMS services or emails is also known from the existing systems. However, this form of notification can only be used when the alarm messages do not exceed a certain number, but this is often not the case in large-scale technical installations.
The above-mentioned methods for presenting alarms in large-scale technical installations do not make it possible at all to identify temporal relationships between the pending alarm messages or make this possible only with difficulty. With a high volume of alarms, the installation operators are quickly overtaxed and cannot respond with the necessary measures in good time. Acoustic signals and messages using SMS and email notifications are often also switched off since the respective service is otherwise overtaxed by the multiplicity of pending alarm messages.